Great River Energy recently completed the expansion of its St. James Service Center following a complex, year-long project that doubled the size of the existing office and shop.
Transmission technicians, equipment and maintenance materials are strategically located at service centers throughout Great River Energy’s service territory to help ensure reliable, responsive service to Minnesota cooperatives members. These locations allow technicians to respond swiftly to outages and continually monitor and enhance the system.
The new space in St. James has room for additional critical field employees including line, apparatus, power system protection and telecommunications technicians. Employees based out of St. James and New Prague are responsible for maintaining more than 1,600 assets, or individual pieces of equipment.
The St. James expansion allows the two service centers to split the work and decreases the maximum drive time to less than 90 minutes.
“The expanded space allows us to double our staff, which enhances reliability by enabling us to respond more quickly to outages in the surrounding communities and perform substation equipment failure assessment and repairs,” said Greg Schutte, Great River Energy’s director of portfolio delivery.
The project meets the growing needs of the area and offers additional storage for critical spare equipment to be stored closer to where it is needed.
Schutte said Great River Energy worked closely with the City of St. James on the project. The St. James Economic Development Authority sold Great River Energy a piece of real estate in the growing St. James Industrial Park to assist with the expansion.
“We have built a long-term partnership with the City of St. James, which is development-focused,” Schutte said. “We look forward to serving the area for decades to come.”
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